Insights

I've used the 70/20/10 rule when talking to artists about marketing for years, and eventually I liked the principle enough to name my consultancy after it. My version is pretty simple: roughly 70% of what an artist communicates should reveal personality, 20% should be sharing and engaging with the world around them, and only 10% should be directly selling something. So the majority is who you are, what interests you, what you stand for, what influences you and why you make the music you make. The 20% might be other artists, records you love, books, films, places, people you're working with or things you've discovered. Then there's the 10%: stream my song, buy my ticket, come to my show, pre order the record.

There is a thread running through Japanese culture that I became increasingly aware of while I was there, from temples, shrines and traditional imagery through to Studio Ghibli, Pokémon, gaming, anime and contemporary music. Seeing Ado at Summer Sonic and then spending the following couple of weeks travelling around Japan made me think about those connections far more than I had before. I'm 57, so I didn't grow up with Pokémon and I've never played the games. My route into this world has been different. I've become increasingly interested in Studio Ghibli, Japanese film and, inevitably, Japanese music. Perhaps that's why some of the connections struck me so strongly. Rather than growing up with Pokémon and later discovering the culture behind it, I've almost done it backwards. I've spent time in Japan looking at temples, shrines, landscapes and older imagery and then started recognising echoes of those things in the contemporary culture around me.

I have to admit that when I first heard the term "indie poo", I laughed. I knew immediately what it was getting at. There's a particular strand of British guitar music around at the moment that can feel incredibly familiar: the clothes, the references, the vocals, the guitars, the obvious influence of Oasis and other bands that came before them. The phrase was apparently coined on TikTok earlier this year and, like most good insults, it works because you immediately understand the caricature.

The more I've thought about it, though, the less I like it. In fact, I don't like it at all.

Why popular music still struggles to acknowledge the role of education, mentorship and community.

There’s an interesting contradiction at the heart of popular music culture.

Compared to many other creative industries, musicians and artists rarely seem comfortable publicly acknowledging the role that education, mentorship, or wider professional support systems have played in their success. Footballers have no issue acknowledging academies, fashion designers proudly cite the institutions where they trained, and directors routinely discuss the creative environments that shaped them. Within popular music, though, there still seems to be pressure to present artistic development as entirely self-generated.